


The Family Business

by Corycides



Series: Miles Matheson Appreciation Week [3]
Category: Revolution (TV)
Genre: Gen, Supernatural AU - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-19
Updated: 2013-06-19
Packaged: 2017-12-15 11:31:47
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,912
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/849061
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Corycides/pseuds/Corycides
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Charlie Matheson liked her life. It was simple, uncomplicated. Then her mom came back from the dead, kidnapped her brother and killed her Dad. Now she's neck deep in a world of demons and magic she never knew existed, and the only one who can help her is her Uncle Miles.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Family Business

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Thursday (Notation)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Notation/gifts).



Charlie woke up squashed into the back of her uncle’s mid-life crisis red muscle car, her hips and shoulder seized up like she was 92 instead of 22. There was a cold draft around her knees. She peeled one eye open and squinted.

Door was open.

Miles was gone.

Huh. That didn’t happen often. The last month  he’d hovered like a mother hen, like if she didn’t she might just spontaneously summon up a demon and offer it her soul instead of a coffee through a slip of the tongue. Charlie unkinked herself from the back seat and scrambled out of the car, coughing at the delightful early morning smell of diesel and roadside run-off.

Life on the road had sounded a lot more romantic before she’d tried it. Only instead of moonlight camps and strangely wise hitch-hikers, it was all truck stops and handy-wipe baths with mosquitos.

Of course, when she’d first learned about demons and magic and this huge, secret world her family had hidden from her...that had seemed pretty romantic too. Then she’d found out vampires looked more like lampreys than Maybelline models and her dear, dead mom turned up, hoodoo’d Dad and kidnapped Danny.

Life was a series of disappointments, and Miles was all she had left. So he better not have just abandoned her - and his car - at the side of the road. Not after all the trouble she’d gone to just to find him.

 

* * *

 

It wasn’t the sort of bar a divinities student from Harvard would usually find herself in. The floor was sticky, the customers had more ink than her copy of The Book of Kells and it smelt like egg farts and, weirdly enough, thyme. From the looks she was getting, this wasn’t the sort of bar that usually found divinities students in it either.

Charlie hesitated on the doorway, licking dry lips and wanting nothing more than to just run. This wasn’t her. This wasn’t sane. She shouldn’t be here; she should be at the psych wing of a hospital checking herself in for delusions and paranoia.

‘Find your Uncle Miles. Promise me.’

It was the last thing Dad had said, and Charlie had spent two weeks travelling on buses and sleeping in gas station rest rooms to get here. She took a deep breath and stepped over the threshold, squeezing through the tables to the bar. A dark haired woman was working, looking tired and bored. She didn’t bother to look at Charlie as she reached the bar.

‘ID?’

‘I’m looking for Miles Matheson,’ Charlie said. The skin between her shoulders itched, it felt like everyone in the bar was staring at her. Charlie licked her lips. ‘I was told I could find him here.’

The brunette swiped the rag down the bar and now she looked Charlie up and down. Her lush mouth turned down at the corners.

‘No, you ain’t,’ she said. ‘And no, you can’t.’

That was apparently it. She turned her back on Charlie and poured herself a finger of whiskey in a greasy glass. Charlie stared at her lean back - a curl of script curling over her shoulder blade - and tried to kick her brain out of neutral. The calm dismissal hadn’t been what she’d expected.

‘Did he used to come here?’ she pushed. ‘It’s important. Please?’

The woman turned around and looked at Charlie again, harder this time. Whatever she saw made her sigh and come over to lean on the bar, slapping a warm, dry hand down over Charlie’s.

‘He got you pregnant?’

Charlie’s ears felt scorched. ‘No! That’s not...He’s my uncle!’

The woman blinked and pulled back. Charlie heard chairs scrape behind her and had the odd feeling that everyone in the bar had just put a few inches between her and them.

‘You’re Danny Matheson?’

This was not the time to be petty, but that still stung. Charlie was used to Danny being the favourite - sickly enough to need fussed over, brilliant enough to boast about - but seriously? The fact she had boobs usually clued people in that she was the other Matheson. Unless Uncle Miles had never mentioned her at all.

Not, she supposed, that any of her friends knew she had a bad, mad uncle who ran a dive bar in Chicago.

‘Charlie,’ she said. ‘Charlie Matheson.’

The woman raised her eyebrows. ‘Really? Well, you aren’t what I’d expect.’

What did that mean? It didn’t matter, Charlie reminded herself, she just needed to find Miles.

‘So you do know him?’

Pursed lips and a sigh. ‘Wait here.’

The woman started to leave, came back and tossed down the rest of her whiskey. She wiped her mouth and headed to the back of the bar.

 

* * *

 

‘Charlie’s here,’ Nora said, popping her head around the door.

Miles miscopied a number in the ledger, growled and scribbled it out angrily. He glanced up at Nora, flinching from the softness in her eyes. No matter what he did, she kept looking at him like he wasn’t shit. She never learned.

‘Charlie who?’ he snapped.

‘Matheson.’

His hands froze, and fear welled up pre-emptively. Nobody would let Charlie come and see him if it whatever was going down wasn’t bad. He set the pen down and stood up, scrubbing his hand over his face.

‘Shit. I suppose I better see her.’

He made it sound reluctant, dragged out of him on a wire, and part of him was. Someone was dead, or wished they were, for Ben to tell Charlie where to find _him_. He didn’t wish that on his family, no matter what they thought of him, but...she was _here_. Finally.

A quick glance in the mirror made him grimace and scrub his fingers through his hair, trying to make the scruff look like something deliberate. Nora slapped his hands away and did it for him, her lower lip folded between her teeth. She straightened his collar too and smoothed his t-shirt over his stomach.

‘There,’ she said, stepping back. ‘You look presentable.’

He tugged the neck of his t-shirt. ‘Thanks,’ he hesitated. It went against the grain to show weakness, but Nora knew more of his secrets than anyone else. She knew this secret. ‘How’d she look?’

‘Worried. Pretty. She looks like her.’

Miles didn’t know why Nora thought that would be a good thing. He braced himself and went out. It was easy to pick her, like gold amongst the dross of the bar’s usual clients. She didn’t look much like Rachel - blonde but warmer than Rachel’s cold flaxen, soft features and a generous mouth that was all her own.

Big blue eyes looking at him like she was a stranger. It left a sour taste in his mouth, but what did he expect? She’d been, what, three when he saw her last? Four. Crap, he couldn’t even remember.

‘Uncle Miles?’

He snorted. That had an odd sound to it. He slid behind the bar and grabbed himself a beer - it would have been whiskey, but...she was religious, wasn’t she? Ben had said, in one of his letters.

‘Who’s dead?’

She blinked and looked down at her hands, picking nervously at bubbled lacquer on the bar. Her mouth twisted painfully. ‘My Dad.’

Oh, that took the breath out from under him. She didn’t understand, generous sympathy welling in her eyes as she reached for his arm.

‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘He told me to come here.’

‘Who did he want me to kill?’

She pulled her hand back. ‘No-one. Dad isn’t...wasn’t like that.’

He took a swig of his beer, pouring the liquid down on top of what he wanted to say about his brother. The bad and the good.

‘So why are you here?’ he leant on the bar and gave her a skinned back grin that had backed down worse than her over the years. ‘Didn’t come all this way to tell me about Ben. Could have sent a letter.’

‘It’s Danny,’ she said. Her voice faltered, cracking, and then steadied. ‘She took him.’

He straightened up. ‘Who?’

She took a deep breath, sharp white teeth tugging fretfully at her lower lip. ‘My mom,’ she said. Her face creased with a visible need to make him believe her. ‘Rachel. She took Danny. I don’t know why, I don’t know how. I need your help to find him.’

Another drink of beer, like he could drown the things he knew and couldn’t say.

That was the thing about sacrifices. When you made them they seemed like nothing, an easy excision. By the time you realised you were wrong, it was too late. And you couldn’t even tell anyone what you’d lost.

‘Yeah,’ he said, swapping the beer for a bottle of whisky. ‘I figured you wanted something.’

She looked hurt and guilty. It was proof he should have never been a father that he was glad they shared that.

 

* * *

His knees hurt and he felt old. It hadn’t been that long since he’d hung up his knives, had it? It used to be he’d never slept, just fucked and killed and drank his way from one hunt to the next. Now a few nights on the road and he felt like something needed dragging to the knackers yard, not standing on an old crossroads.

‘I have to admit I was surprised when I got your...call,’ Bass said, poking the dead chicken with his boot. ‘Changed your mind?’

‘No.’

Bass threw his arms out. ‘Hug for an old friend?’

Miles glanced down at the bright red lines of the devil’s trap and smiled thinly. ‘Not right now.’

He kind of wished he could. It hurt nearly as much to see Bass again, like this, as it had to meet Charlie. Miles was sick to his back teeth of hurting, but he supposed it was the coin of the realm.

‘I need your help,’ he said.

‘Really?’ Bass said, looking over Miles shoulder. That wild, mad grin of his lit up his face and he winked a beetle-black eye at whoever he saw. ‘You, or her?’

Miles hunched his shoulders and sighed out a lungful of air, turning around. Of course she was there, rumpled and sleepy in a too-short t-shirt and a pair of his jeans sinking dangerously low around her hips. He closed his eyes and tried to remember four-year-old her.

‘Fuck.’

‘What’s going on?’ Charlie demanded, her voice rising dangerously. ‘Who’s he? He looks like the ones that came with mom. The demons.’

She couldn’t have been stupid, could she? It would have made his life so much easier. Miles opened his eyes just in time to catch Charlie before she hit the border of the Trap. He picked her up and moved her back.

‘Spoilsport,’ Bass said. ‘Hello, Charlotte. I haven’t seen you in a long time.’

‘Who are you?’ Charlie demanded. She shoved at Miles’ chest until he let her go. ‘Who is he?’

‘...’

‘Sebastian Monroe,’ Bass said. ‘Your godfather. Well-’ He scratched the corner of one black eye. ‘Demonfather now, I guess.’

‘But...I don’t understand,’ Charlie said.

Miles sighed and rubbed his hands over his face. ‘Our family...we were never Hunters, Charlie.’ He blinked and when he looked up the world was desaturated, touched with grey and blood and power. From the corner of his eye he could see Sebastian, and Charlie was vivid. His beautiful price. She pressed her hand to her mouth, eyes gone ridiculously huge. ‘We’re the monsters.’

 

 


End file.
